For World Water Week, our regular guest blogger Alanna Shaikh has provided us a two-part series on the cost of water. Take a look:
By: Alanna Shaikh
It’s hard to think about paying for water, but it’s also hard to provide it for free. What’s the middle ground?
As this week makes extremely clear, we can’t rely on water as a free resource any more. Clean water is scarce in many places, and it is going to get scarcer. Growing human populations combined with climate change radically increase the demand for water as it becomes more polluted. We need more safe water even as it becomes increasingly harder to get.
Is increasing water costs the answer? I’d argue yes, and I have personal experience to back it up. I’ve lived in Central Asia for the last ten years. This region is extremely water scarce. In fact, many people think that the first major war over water is going to break out here. There are competing demands of water for irrigation, hydroelectric power, household and industrial use, in a region that is essentially a desert full of mountains. Most of the water comes from snow melt.
And yet people treat water like it’s nothing at all. They leave the taps running in their homes and yards at all times. They water the streets outside their houses to keep the dust down. They wash their cars daily, grow water-intense plants for fun, and pretty much never bother to fix leaky taps or faucets. Some faucets don’t even have taps, so you actually cannot turn them off. Oh, and every big house has a fountain, and not the kind that recirculates. In fact, my very first published piece of writing was an article decrying wasteful water use in this region.
» Read more: The Price of Water — Part 1
